Chapter 10

The observations were made in New Zealand,--Dr. Thomson being stationed there with his regiment, and being charged with the duty of vaccinating all natives employed by the government. The islanders thus used for experiment were to some extent picked men, as none but able-bodied persons would have been selected for employ, and as they were, moreover, (he states,) accustomed to lifting burdens, and better-fed than the majority of their countrymen. The New Zealand race, as a whole, is certainly a very favorable type of barbarism, having but just emerged from an utterly savage condition, having been cannibals within one generation, and being the very identical people among whom were recorded those wonderful cures of flesh-wounds to which Emerson has referred. Cook and all other navigators have praised their robust physical aspect, and they undoubtedly, with the Fijians and the Tongans, stand at the head of all island races. They are admitted to surpass our American Indians, as well as the Kaffirs and the Joloffs, probably the finest African races; and a careful comparison between New-Zealanders and Anglo-Saxons will, therefore, approach as near to an _experimentum crucis_ as any single set of observations can. The following tables have been carefully prepared from those of Dr. Thomson, with the addition of some scanty facts from other sources,--scanty, because, as Quetelet indignantly observes, less pains have as yet been taken to measure accurately the physical powers of man than those of any machine he has constructed or any animal he has tamed.

TABLE.

HEIGHT. _Number measured. Average._ New-Zealanders................... 147 5 feet 6-3/4 inches. Students at Edinburgh............ 800 5 " 7-1/10 " Class of 1860. Cambridge (Mass.). 106 5 " 7-3/5 " Students at Cambridge (Eng.)..... 80 5 " 8-3/5 "

WEIGHT. New-Zealanders................... 146 140 pounds. Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 1778 142 " Class of 1860. Cambridge (Mass.). 106 142-1/2 " Students at Cambridge (Eng.)..... 80 143 " Men weighed at Boston (U.S.) Mechanics' Fair, 1860 ......... 4369 146-3/4 " Englishmen (Dr. Thomson)......... 2648 148 " Cambridge, Eng. (a newspaper statement) .................... ---- 151 " Revolutionary officers at West Point, August 10th, 1778, given in "Milledulcia," p. 273.. 11 226 "

AREA OF CHEST. New-Zealanders................... 151 35.36 inches. Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 628 36.71 "

STRENGTH IN LIFTING. New-Zealanders................... 31 367 pounds. Students fit Edinburgh, aged 25.. ---- 416 " Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 33 422 "

NOTE. The range of strength among the New-Zealanders was from 250 pounds to 420 pounds; among the soldiers, from 350 pounds to 504 pounds.

But it is the test of longevity which exhibits the greatest triumph for civilization, because here the life-insurance tables furnish ample, though comparatively recent statistics. Of course, in legendary ages all lives were of enormous length; and the Hindoos in their sacred books attribute to their progenitors a career of forty million years or thereabouts,--what may safely be termed a ripe old age; for if a man were still unripe after celebrating his forty-millionth birthday, he might as well give it up. But from the beginning of accurate statistics we know that the duration of life in any nation is a fair index of its progress in civilization, Quetelet gives statistics, more or less reliable, from every nation of Northern Europe, showing a gain of ten to twenty-five per cent, during the last century. Where the tables are most carefully prepared, the result is least equivocal. Thus, in Geneva, where accurate registers have been kept for three hundred years, it seems that from 1560 to 1600 the average lifetime of the citizens was twenty-one years and two months; in the next century, twenty-five years and nine months; in the century following, thirty-two years and nine months; and in the year 1833, forty years and five months: thus nearly doubling the average age of man in Geneva, within those three centuries of social progress. In France, it is estimated, that, in spite of revolutions and Napoleons, human life has been gaining at the rate of two months a year for nearly a century. By a manuscript of the fourteenth century, moreover, it is shown that the rate of mortality in Paris was then one in sixteen,--one person dying annually to every sixteen of the inhabitants. It is now one in thirty-two,--a gain of a hundred per cent, in five hundred years. In England the progress has been far more rapid. The rate of mortality in 1690 was one in thirty-three; in 1780 it was one in forty; and it stands now at one in sixty,--the healthiest condition in Europe,--while in half-barbarous Russia the rate of mortality is one in twenty-seven. It would be easy to multiply these statistics to any extent; but they all point one way, and no medical statistician now pretends to oppose the dictum of Hufeland, that "a certain degree of culture is physically necessary for man, and promotes duration of life."

The simple result is, that the civilized man is physically superior to the barbarian. There is now no evidence that there exists in any part of the world a savage race who, taken as a whole, surpass or even equal the Anglo-Saxon type in average physical condition; as there is also none among whom the President elect of the United States and the Commander-in-chief of his armies would not be regarded as remarkably tall men, and Dr. Windship a remarkably strong one. "It is now well known," says Prichard, "that all savage races have less muscular power than civilized men." Johnstone in Northern Africa, and Cumming in Southern Africa, could find no one to equal them in strength of arm. At the Sandwich Islands, Ellis records, that, "when a boat manned by English seamen and a canoe with natives left the shore together, the canoe would uniformly leave the boat behind, but they would soon relax, while the seamen, pulling steadily on, would pass them, but, if the voyage took three hours, would invariably reach the destination first." Certain races may have been regularly trained by position and necessity in certain particular arts,--as Sandwich-Islanders in swimming, and our Indians in running,--and may naturally surpass the average skill of those who are comparatively out of practice in that speciality; yet it is remarkable that their greatest feats even in these ways never seem to surpass those achieved by picked specimens of civilization. The best Indian runners could only equal Lewis and Clarke's men, and they have been repeatedly beaten in prize-races within the last few years; while the most remarkable aquatic feat on record is probably that of Mr. Atkins of Liverpool, who recently dived to a depth of two hundred and thirty feet, reappearing above water in one minute and eleven seconds.

In the wilderness and on the prairies, we find a general impression that cultivation and refinement must weaken the race. Not at all; they simply domesticate it. Domestication is not weakness. A strong hand does not become less muscular under a kid glove; and a man who is a hero in a red shirt will also be a hero in a white one. Civilization, imperfect as it is, has already procured for us better food, better air, and better behavior; it gives us physical training on system; and its mental training, by refining the nervous organization, makes the same quantity of muscular power go much farther. The young English ensigns and lieutenants who at Waterloo (in the words of Wellington) "rushed to meet death, as if it were a game of cricket," were the fruit of civilization. They were representatives, indeed, of the aristocracy of their nation; and here, where the aim of all institutions is to make the whole nation an aristocracy, we must plan to secure the same splendid physical superiority on a grander scale. It is in our power, by using even very moderately for this purpose our magnificent machinery of common schools, to give to the physical side of civilization an advantage which it has possessed nowhere else, not even in England or Germany. It is not yet time to suggest detailed plans on this subject, since the public mind is not yet fully awake even to the demand. When the time comes, the necessary provisions can be made easily,--at least, as regards boys; for the physical training of girls is a far more difficult problem The organization is more delicate and complicated, the embarrassments greater, the observations less carefully made, the successes fewer, the failures far more disastrous. Any intelligent and robust man may undertake the physical training of fifty boys, however delicate their organization, with a reasonable hope of rearing nearly all of them, by easy and obvious methods, into a vigorous maturity; but what wise man or woman can expect anything like the same proportion of success, at present, with fifty American girls?

This is the most momentous health-problem with which we have to deal,-- to secure the proper physical advantages of civilization for American women. Without this there can be no lasting progress. The Sandwich Island proverb says,--

"If strong be the frame of the mother, Her son shall make laws for the people."

But in this country, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every man grows to maturity surrounded by a circle of invalid female relatives, that he later finds himself the husband of an invalid wife and the parent of invalid daughters, and that he comes at last to regard invalidism, as Michelet coolly declares, the normal condition of that sex,--as if the Almighty did not know how to create a woman. This, of course, spreads a gloom over life. When I look at the morning throng of schoolgirls in summer, hurrying through every street, with fresh, young faces, and vesture of lilies, duly curled and straw-hatted and booted, and turned off as patterns of perfection by proud mammas,--it is not sad to me to think that all this young beauty must one day fade and die, for there are spheres of life beyond this earth, I know, and the soul is good to endure through more than one;--the sadness is in the unnatural nearness of the decay, to foresee the living death of disease that is waiting close at hand for so many, to know how terrible a proportion of those fair children are walking unconsciously into a weary, wretched, powerless, joyless, useless maturity. Among the myriad triumphs of advancing civilization, there seems but one formidable danger, and that is here.

It cannot be doubted, however, that the peril will pass by, with advancing knowledge. In proportion to our national recklessness of danger is the promptness with which remedial measures are adopted, when they at last become indispensable. In the mean time, we must look for proofs of the physical resources of woman into foreign and even into savage lands. When an American mother tells me with pride, as occasionally happens, that her daughter can walk two miles and back without great fatigue, the very boast seems a tragedy; but when one reads that Oberea, queen of the Sandwich Islands, lifted Captain Wallis over a marsh as easily as if he had been a little child, there is a slight sense of consolation. Brunhilde, in the "Nibelungen," binds her offending lover with her girdle and slings him up to the wall. Cymburga, wife of Duke Ernest of Lithuania, could crack nuts between her fingers, and drive nails into a wall with her thumb;--whether she ever got her husband under it is not recorded. Let me preserve from oblivion the renown of my Lady Butterfield, who, about the year 1700, at Wanstead, in Essex, (England,) thus advertised:--"This is to give notice to my honored masters and ladies and loving friends, that my Lady Butterfield gives a challenge to ride a horse, or leap a horse, or run afoot, or _hollo_, with any woman in England seven years younger, but not a day older, because I won't undervalue myself, being now 74 years of age." Nor should be left unrecorded the high-born Scottish damsel whose tradition still remains at the Castle of Huntingtower, in Scotland, where two adjacent pinnacles still mark the Maiden's Leap. She sprang from battlement to battlement, a distance of nine feet and four inches, and eloped with her lover. Were a young lady to go through one of our villages in a series of leaps like that, and were she to require her lovers to follow in her footsteps, it is to be feared that she would die single.

Yet the transplanted race which has in two centuries stepped from Delft Haven to San Francisco has no reason to be ashamed of its physical achievements, the more especially as it has found time on the way for one feat of labor and endurance which may be matched without fear against any historic deed. When civilization took possession of this continent, it found one vast coating of almost unbroken forest overspreading it from shore to prairie. To make room for civilization, that forest must go. What were Indians, however deadly,--what starvation, however imminent,--what pestilence, however lurking,--to a solid obstacle like this? No mere courage could cope with it, no mere subtlety, no mere skill, no Yankee ingenuity, no labor-saving machine with head for hands; but only firm, unwearying, bodily muscle to every stroke. Tree by tree, in two centuries, that forest has been felled. What were the Pyramids to that? There does not exist in history an athletic feat so astonishing.

But there yet lingers upon this continent a forest of moral evil more formidable, a barrier denser and darker, a Dismal Swamp of inhumanity, a barbarism upon the soil, before which civilization has thus far been compelled to pause,--happy, if it could even check its spread. Checked at last, there comes from it a cry as if the light of day had turned to darkness,--when the truth simply is, that darkness is being mastered and surrounded by the light of day. Is it a good thing to "extend the area of freedom" by pillaging some feeble Mexico? and does the phrase become a bad one only when it means the peaceful progress of constitutional liberty within our own borders? The phrases which oppression teaches become the watchwords of freedom at last, and the triumph of Civilization over Barbarism is the only Manifest Destiny of America.

WHO WAS CASPAR HAUSER?

Recent publications have again attracted our attention to a subject which about thirty years ago was the cause of great excitement and innumerable speculations. The very extraordinary advent, life, and death of Caspar Hauser, the novelty and singularity of all his thoughts and actions, and his charming innocence and amiability, interested at the time all Europe in his behalf. Thrown upon the world in a state of utter helplessness, he was adopted by one of the cities of Germany, and became not only a universal pet, but a sight which people flocked from all parts to see. It became a perfect fever, raging throughout Germany, and extending also to other countries. The papers teemed with accounts and conjectures. Innumerable essays and even books were written, almost every one advancing a different theory for the solution of the mystery. But his death was still more the occasion for their appearance, and for some time thereafter they literally swarmed from the press. Every one who had in any way come in contact with him, and a great many who knew him by reputation only, thought themselves called upon to give their views, so that in a little while the subject acquired almost a literature of its own.

But this excitement gradually disappeared, and with it most of the literature which it had called forth. There are a few names, however, which occur frequently in connection with that of Caspar Hauser, to whose opinions we shall subsequently call attention. They are Feuerbach, Daumer, Merker, Stanhope, Binder, Meier, and Fuhrmann.[A] Of these, Binder was his earliest protector; Feuerbach conducted the legal investigations to which Caspar's mysterious appearance gave rise; Daumer was for a long time his teacher and host; Stanhope adopted him; Meier afterwards filled Daumer's place; and Fuhrmann was the clergyman who attended his death-bed. Merker, though never thrown very closely in contact with Caspar, was a Prussian Counsellor of Police, and as such his opinion may perhaps have more than ordinary weight with some. Most of them published their various opinions during Caspar's life or soon after his death, and the subject was then allowed to sink to its proper level and attract no further attention. Within a few years, however, it has again been brought into prominent light by some new publications. One of these is an essay written by Feuerbach and published in his works edited by his son, in which he endeavors to prove that Caspar Hauser was the son of the Grand Duchess Stephanie of Baden; another is a book by Daumer, which he devotes entirely to the explosion of all theories that have ever been advanced; and a third, by Dr. Eschricht, contends that Caspar was at first an idiot and afterwards an impostor. Before considering these different theories, let us recall the principal incidents of his life. These have, indeed, been placed within the reach of the English reader by the Earl of Stanhope's book and by a translation of Feuerbach's "Kaspar Hauser. Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen,"[B] published in Boston in 1832; but, as the former has, we believe, obtained little circulation in this country, and the latter is now probably out of print, a short account of the life of this singular being may not be deemed amiss.

[Footnote A: Daumer, in his _Disclosures concerning Caspar Hauser_, refers to a great many more than these; but it is impossible to follow his example in so limited a space.]

[Footnote B: _Caspar Hauser. An Example of a Crime against the Life, of Man's Soul_.]

On the 26th of May, 1828, a citizen of Nuremberg, while loitering in front of his house in the outskirts of the town, saw, tottering towards him, a lad of sixteen or seventeen years, coarsely and poorly clad. He held in his hand a letter, which he presented to the citizen; but to all questions as to who he was, whence he came, and what he wanted, he replied only in an unintelligible jargon. The letter was addressed to the captain of a cavalry company then stationed at Nuremberg, to whom he was taken. It stated substantially, that a boy had been left at the writer's door on the 7th of October, 1812, that the writer was a poor laborer with a large family, but that he had nevertheless adopted the boy, and had reared him in such strict seclusion from the world that not even his existence was known. The letter said further, that, so far from being able to answer, the lad could not even comprehend any questions put to him. It therefore discouraged all attempts to obtain any information in that way, and ended with the advice, that, according to his desire, he should be made a dragoon, as his father had been before him. Inclosed in this letter was a note, professedly by the mother, and pretending to have been left with him, when, as an infant, Caspar Hauser was first cast upon the world, but, in reality, as it was afterwards proved, written by the same person. This note gave the date of his birth, pleaded the poverty of the mother as an excuse for thus abandoning her child, and contained the same request as to his joining a cavalry regiment when he should arrive at the age of seventeen.

The first impression produced by Caspar's appearance and behavior was, that he was some idiot or lunatic escaped from confinement; it remained only to be shown whence he had escaped. In the mean time he was placed under the protection of the police, who removed him to their guard-room. There he showed no consciousness of what was going on around him; his look was a dull, brutish stare; nor did he give any indication of intelligence, until pen and paper were placed in his hand, when he wrote clearly and repeatedly, "Kaspar Hauser." Since then he has been known by that name.

When it became evident that the first conjectures concerning him were wrong, strenuous efforts were made by the police to sound the mystery, but without the slightest success. He himself could give no clue; for he neither understood what others said nor could make himself understood. With the exception of some six words, the sounds Caspar uttered were entirely meaningless. He recognized none of the places where he had been, no trace could be obtained of him elsewhere, and the most vigilant search brought nothing to light. The surprise which his first appearance produced increased as he became better known. It then became more and more evident that he was neither an idiot nor a lunatic; at the same time his manners were so peculiar, and his ignorance of civilized life and his dislike for its customs so great, that all sorts of conjectures were resorted to in order to explain the mystery.

It was ascertained that he must have been incarcerated in some dungeon, entirely shut out from the light of the sun, which gave him great pain. The structure of his body, the tenderness of his feet, and the great difficulty and suffering which he experienced in walking, indicated beyond a doubt that he had been kept in a sitting posture, with his legs stretched straight out before him. His sustenance had been bread and water; for he not only evinced great repugnance to any other food, but the smallest quantity affected his constitution in the most violent manner. It was also evident that he had never come in contact with human beings, beyond what was necessary for supplying his immediate wants, and, strange to say, teaching him to write.

That these inferences were well-founded was proved by the subsequent disclosures of Caspar himself, after he had acquired a sufficient command of language. The account he then gave was as follows.

"He neither knows who he is nor where his home is. It was only at Nuremberg that he came into the world. Here he first learned, that, besides himself and 'the man with whom he had always been,' there existed other men and other creatures. As long as he can recollect, he had always lived in a hole, (a small, low apartment, which he sometimes calls a cage,) where he had always sat upon the ground, with bare feet, and clothed only with a shirt and a pair of breeches. In his apartment, he never heard a sound, whether produced by a man, by an animal, or by anything else. He never saw the heavens, nor did there ever appear a brightening (daylight) such as at Nuremberg, he never perceived any difference between day and night, and much less did he ever get a sight of the beautiful lights in the heavens. Whenever he awoke from sleep, he found a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water by him. Sometimes his water had a bad taste; whenever this was the case, he could no longer keep his eyes open, but was compelled to fall asleep; and when he afterwards awoke, he found that he had a clean shirt on, and that his nails had been cut.[C]

[Footnote C: When he resided with Professor Daumer, a drop of opium in a glass of water was administered to him. After swallowing a mouthful, he exclaimed, "That water is nasty; it tastes exactly like the water I was sometimes obliged to drink in my cage."]